The Bilateral Ethiopia – Netherlands Effort for Food, Income and Trade (BENEFIT)
Job description
Category: Agricultural development, Project management
Location: Haramaya University
Career Level: Mid-career Level (5+ years’ experience)
Employment Type: Full time
Salary: Based on the Scale of BENEFIT experts.
Background
The Bilateral Ethiopia Netherlands Effort for Food Income and Trade (BENEFIT) partnership is a portfolio of five
programmes (ISSD Ethiopia, CASCAPE, ENTAG, SBN and REALISE), which is funded by the Government of the
Kingdom of Netherlands through its Embassy in Addis Ababa. REALISE: ‘Realising Sustainable Agricultural
Livelihood Security in Ethiopia’ is the new pragramme under BENEFIT. REALISE Programme is designed to
take the achievements of CASCAPE (Capacity building for Scaling up of evidence-based best Practices in
Agricultural Production’ (CASCAPE) programme and the ‘Integrated Seed Sector Development’ (ISSD) Ethiopia
programme to new areas and target groups in Ethiopia.
REALISE is a three – year (2018-2020) programme that will align with the Government of Ethiopia’s (GoE)
Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP). This GoE flagship programme currently reaches 8 million chronically
food insecure Ethiopians with a wide array of instruments to smooth consumption, prevent asset depletion and
promote livelihood diversification including uptake of improved agricultural practices. REALISE aims to take
lessons learned from the Wageningen University & Research, CASCAPE and ISSD Ethiopia programmes to
PSNP target woredas.
The goal of the REALISE programme is: ‘Enhanced human, organisational and institutional capacities to adapt,
validate and scale best fit practices to improve the resilience of chronically food insecure households in PSNP
woredas. REALISE’s goal is to be achieved through four primary outcomes:
1. Developed best fit practices that meet expressed needs and have the potential to contribute to increased
productivity and resilience are available for scaling in selected PSNP Woredas;
2. Increased availability, timely delivery and use of quality seed of new, improved, and/or farmer preferred
varieties through diverse channels;
3. Enhanced human, organizational and institutional capacities for matching, adapting, validating and scaling
best fit practices; and
4. A conducive environment exists for the institutionalisation of evidence-based system innovations.
The implementation model is based on the experiences of the CASCAPE and ISSD Ethiopia programmes in that
REALISE will partner with the Regional Agricultural Research Institutes, Bureaus of Agriculture and Livestock
Resources/food security offices and a number of Ethiopian Universities that will each manage so called
clusters: Hawassa, Haramaya, Arsi, Bahir Dar, Woldia and Mekelle. There are two satellite Universities:
Odabultum University that will collaborate with Haramaya University and Arbaminch University that will
collaborate with Hawassa University. The REALISE programme will validate and scale best fit practices, will
assure the availability of quality seed, will train related GoE and NGO partners in the proper scaling of the…..
